Writing the Record

The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism

Devon Powers

Publication Year: 2013

During the mid-1960s, a small group of young journalists made it their mission to write about popular music, especially rock, as something worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny. Their efforts not only transformed the perspective on the era’s music but revolutionized how Americans have come to think, talk, and write about popular music ever since.
In Writing the Record, Devon Powers explores this shift by focusing on The Village Voice, a key publication in the rise of rock criticism. Revisiting the work of early pop critics such as Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau, Powers shows how they stood at the front lines of the mass culture debates, challenging old assumptions and hierarchies and offering pioneering political and social critiques of the music. Part of a college-educated generation of journalists, Voice critics explored connections between rock and contemporary intellectual trends such as postmodernism, identity politics, and critical theory. In so doing, they became important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture that would emerge during the 1970s.
Drawing on archival materials, interviews, and insights from media and cultural studies, Powers not only narrates a story that has been long overlooked but also argues that pop music criticism has been an important channel for the expression of public intellectualism. This is a history that is particularly relevant today, given the challenges faced by criticism of all stripes in our current media environment. Powers makes the case for the value of well-informed cultural criticism in an age when it is often suggested that “everyone is a critic.”

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Criticism

The last time I saw Ellen Willis was in the late spring of 2006, when we
met to discuss my dissertation, a project I would later revise into this book.
Now, I can only remember snippets of our encounter. Out of respect for
the graduate students on strike as New York University’s administration
blocked their efforts to unionize, she insisted we meet off campus, choosing...

1. Village

On October 30, 1955, the New York Times announced to the rest of the city
word of a new downtown newspaper. Called the Village Voice, it printed its
first issue on October 26 and sold for five cents every Wednesday at Lower
Manhattan vendors. Editor Dan Wolf and publisher Ed Fancher intended
to make their paper Village-centric not just in distribution. Localism also
governed its choice of writers—as Wolf put it, the neighborhood teemed...

2. Pop

Over the course of Goldstein’s polemic, his tone grew more urgent—one
might even say incensed. “We learn to tell Dostoevski from Spillane, but we
know nothing about the flicks,” he wrote. “We learn to tell Rembrandt from
Keane, but we know nothing about advertising.” Here, in the fourth edition
of his new ...

3. Hype

The above is an excerpt from Richard Goldstein’s “Giraffe Hunters,” a piece
he wrote toward the end of 1966. Its graphic imagery portended what would
be the overwhelming theme of his writing as his tenure at the Voice came to
a close: the industry’s violent, dramatic capture of the spirit of rock. Coming
just months after his column’s enthusiastic beginning, “Giraffe Hunters”...

4. Identity

The Voice critics who wrote into 1969 and beyond continued to question
the efficacy of a rock-fueled revolution—a debate deeply intertwined with
concerns over whether rock culture was losing its momentum, cogency,
and meaning. Christgau professed his ambivalence in his column Rock &
Roll &, writing “Rock and roll . . . is going to revolutionize the world,” before...

5. Mattering

The 1970s secured Christgau’s standing as one of rock criticism’s most perspicacious
observers as well as its eagerest workhorse. As editor of the Voice
music section, he steered the writing of numerous prominent critics; his
tireless effort at the Consumer Guide, for a number of years printed in the
Voice as well as Creem, guaranteed that his writing style and taste preferences...

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